David Gunn - Death's head

A real music, odd and dissonant and weirdly seductive, with an unexpected echo. I can hear my own thoughts, but they’re time-lagged by a split second. A waterfall of fears and memories that I have… no way of turning off

My throat hurts, and as I cough the slug seethes slightly and then settles.

I vomit again, a sour stream little thicker than beer, but it’s almost from habit now, and I know that next time I’ll be able to swallow the reflex and the taste in my throat. Either the slug is thinner, it’s dug itself deeper into my gullet, or I’m already getting… used to this

The towel is clean for the first time in days.

My eyes are hollow and my cheeks stubbled, my gut sinks in toward my ribs where fever has stripped what fat I had from my frame. My muscles look like bundled wires beneath my sallow skin. I’m pretty sure my eyes have changed color but that has to be… impossible

As my thoughts synchronize with themselves, I feel the music in my head fade and the sounds of my own body recede into the background. In their place is a great emptiness. I can see myself for what I am, some hick soldier out of his depth in a strange city on a mission still to be revealed.

It’s a very scary thought.

Except it isn’t.

Already I’ve noted my arm, the strength in my body, the mind that’s barely been stretched to thought in the first twenty-eight years of its life. The potential is there, I can use that.

I will use it.

Staggering to the window, I look out on the edges of Farlight. Ahead of me I see the Bosworth Landing Field and beyond that the Emsworth Favelas, climbing the lower slopes of the caldera. Above is Calinda Gap, a gash cut by time and strange tides in the bowl’s rocky edge.

How do I know these things?

I don’t know, but accept that I do. And as I turn to look at a different section of this outer city, facts slip into place and history backs up behind physical objects. These are my thoughts and I can just about control them, but the information is being drawn from somewhere else.

This is definitely not how it is meant to work. The slug is meant to allow access to a low-level neural link to let me pass and receive messages, sliding them under even the most sophisticated surveillance devices. An agent of the general’s should be making contact, mental contact, but I don’t think he is this vast hollowness and intelligence that is filling my head.

You are mine now.

Are you listening?

Pushing away the emptiness, I stagger back to the mirror. How I look has never much interested me. I get the usual girls a legionnaire gets, which is mostly the ones other men don’t want. It’s a cruel fact but then it’s a cruel world and I’ve forgotten how many times my sister told me that when I was a child; and everything I’ve heard and seen since suggests it’s true.

Doesn’t have to be.

“Who are you?” I demand finally.

The voice laughs. “Who do you think?” it says. “I’m OctoV, your emperor. ” Something in the way the voice says this makes me swallow, and sourness immediately fills my throat.

“I don’t understand.”

“Few of you do.”

“Of us?”

The voice nods, absurd as that sounds. I can hear the voice, but only in my head, and what I’m hearing is more thought than actual speech. I get the inflections, the nuances that a speaker might put into the words were they actually verbal, but it is more an intimation of how they should sound.

Inflections, nuances, intimations-where do these terms come from?

Don’t underestimate yourself, says the voice. Anyway, you heard them from your guardian as a child.

“What am I meant to do?”

Your job.

“Are you going to tell me what that is?”

Someone else will. You must do the job the general sends you to do. Because if you don’t he will have you killed, and that would be inconvenient. So do what you do and be who you are. We’ll talk later.

“When?” I ask as the voice begins fading.

A day or so, a week, a month, a few years. It’s hard to be exact. Necessity is so fluid at this level.

And then the voice is gone and I’m alone again. The urge to vomit is also gone, and in its place is a hunger to see this city and do my job. I examine those thoughts carefully, worried they might belong to someone else, but they genuinely seem to be mine.

A knock at my door spins me around and the laser knife is in my hand before I’m even aware of the fact. Lisa stands there, eyes wide and appalled. Maybe it’s at my nakedness, at the knife in my hand, or at the fact that one of my arms is made from black metal. Maybe it’s just the stink and the state of my room.

“There’s someone here to see you.”

“Someone?”

“A man,” she says. “He’s been waiting.”

“How long?”

“About three hours.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

This time her eyes definitely flick to the knife in my hand. “I did,” she says. “You threatened to kill the first person who came into this room.”

“Had my mind on other things,” I say.

There’s a fear in her face that looks ugly.

She’s not as young as she’d like, but she’s still a lot younger than I am and this is her life and where she lives, and where she’ll probably always live. I need to learn to handle these things.

“Sorry,” I say. “Battle fever. It’s over now.”

She looks around my room and her nose wrinkles.

“Yeah. It stinks. I’ll get it cleaned up and get myself cleaned up and then I’ll go have a beer. Maybe you could join me?”

“Battle fever?” she asks, neither accepting nor rejecting my invitation.

I nod, looking sheepish.

“You were a soldier. Where?”

Fort Karbonne, a wretched little planet in a wretched little solar system so far from here you won’t even have heard of the nearest star.

I’m right, she hasn’t.

“You’re a long way from home.”

“Yeah, a long way.”

Something in my eyes makes her accept my earlier invitation to have a drink. “But you’ll need to get yourself cleaned up.” Her voice is hesitant, because she’s anxious not to offend me, and I smile, realizing that I really must look dreadful if I’m not fit for some dive on the edge of a Farlight favela.

“Send the guy up,” I tell her.

“I’m Charles Decharge,” he says.

He’s small and wiry, an underfed version of Phibs. When he hurries into my room his eyes are already flicking from corner to corner, as if searching for unexpected enemies.

“You’re meant to have swallowed your kyp by now.”

“My what?”

“ Aculeus accipio… You were given one.”

“It’s fitted,” I say, opening my mouth. “Want to take a look?”

He backs away, his face blanking as he concentrates frantically. The very faintest echo of a thought appears inside my head. It’s a whisper to the roar I heard earlier. I have almost no sense of emotion and certainly nothing resembling nuance, but it’s there.

“Got you,” says deCharge.

“Yeah.”

“Did you have a hard time of it?” He takes one look at my room, sees the drying sheets and sodden towels, and realizes the absurdity of his own question.

“Can you hear me?” he asks.

And his question is inside my own head, so I nod.

“Good,” he says. “This is your mission.”

He’s talking quickly, anxious to get away from a face-to-face meeting, because such meetings are obviously a rarity for him.

“Five weeks ago Senator Debro Wildeside was disgraced in a plot instigated by her cousin, Senator Thomassi. She’s in exile, as is her ex-husband Anton Urbana, who has taken the place of their daughter Aptitude…

“With me so far?”

I nod, trying to keep my face neutral.